Monday, May 01, 2006

On May 1, 2006, at 9:22 AM, Dr. Eric Davis wrote: Jack - FYI: Bob Baker is only collaborating with Chinese universities because DARPA program managers twice rejected his proposals.

Perhaps with good reason? I don't really know. Have you checked out this stuff closely? Has Hal? How does it connect with Ray Chiao's idea for "gravity radio"?

Yes, I have checked all this out myself. Hal has not because he is not involved with Baker's effort. I am. Ray Chiao abandoned his gravity radio project because he found an error in his calculations.

Do you have details on that? I would like to know precisely what the error was. Has Ray published a retraction?

My speciulation is that the HFGW research he proposed did not fit the program and funding portfolios of the DARPA departments. NASA no longer has an advanced concepts or propulsion program since its adaptation of the "heritage technologies" paradigm.

What's that?

Earlier this year NASA announced that it will replace the Space Shuttle with a Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV) that is based on the Apollo command module and return capsule design but upgraded with 21st century tech. The launch vehicle for the CEV is to be based on the Space Shuttle solid rocket booster (which has 4 solid fuel segments) but modified to be a single 5-segment solid fuel first stage augmented by a LH2/LOX upper stage or maybe liquid fuel booster rockets.

So it's back to the future for both the Apollo spacecraft and Space Shuttle heritage technologies. There will be no using alternative liquid fuels, no nuclear rocket engines, and no other form of advanced propulsion outside of nuclear concepts. And certainly there will be no spaceplane type of crew vehicle.

The NIAC only has limited funding for short-term and long-term studies with little hardware development. The AFOSR also has backed away from advanced physics funding since 2004 since the pressure is on for them to support R&D for the war in Iraq. The NSF won't fund Baker because he is not at a university, and their peer review panels are all manned by low frequency gravity wave adherents.

You mean Kip Thorne at Cal Tech primarily and his MIT associates.

Plus the other peer reviewers at other universities that NSF draws on.

The Chinese were the only ones to cough up several years of funding (in the millions of dollars), lab facilities, ultra-high intensity lasers, lots of grad students and postdocs, and the cooperation of several top flight general relativity experts there. The U.S. general relativity community is stuck in the LIGO and LISA paradigms with billions of dollars committed for low frequency gravity waves and no interest to do anything else.

What is it something like the (frequency)^4 ? scaling of power output? Is that the key idea here?

I don't recall what the scaling is off the top of my head. I'd have to look for the relevant papers.

Baker et al. (including myself) are pushing the high frequency paradigm since the Gertsenshtein Effect can make it happen, and Landau & Lifshitz give a GR prescription for HFGWs. Baker's derivations are all based on L & L's book plus other standard texts, no new physics was invented, just new techniques for making quadrupole HFGW radiation.

Is that Classical Theory of Fields or Electrodynamics of Continuous Media - I have them both.

Classical Theory of Fields.

OK

OK even if one is able to get a detectable signal strength for HFGW - perhaps OK for C^3 that's plausible, but I see no way to get propulsion? Do you or Hal?

It turns out that Einstein’s General Relativity Theory in principle allows for a beam of gravitational radiation to be used as a rocket propellant.

The issue is, is it geodesic or not? I mean would it be like the Alcubierre drive without any g-force on the occupants like we see in Paul Hill's empirical analysis of the saucer's "acceleration fields" or would it simply be another impulse engine from the Poynting type vector momentum energy propagated away from the ship? Put another way, when a source emits a gravity wave is the source pushed off a timelike geodesic from the gravity radiation reaction back on the source? In this sense, is the gravity wave like any other "rocket propellant" like throwing out atoms, or ions, or electrons - or does the path of the source stay geodesic because the gravity waves modifying the the metric field in such a way as to simply change the geodesic of the source?

So it would seem that equivalence principle demands that this geodesic equation cannot be violated with emission of only gravity waves? There is no e/m here, it's still Paul Hill "acceleration field" or George Trimble "G-Engine" right? I could be wrong. What do you think? I am not sure because I never thought about this before. Basically, only NON-GRAVITY FORCES (basically electromagnetic forces) can push the object OFF a geodesic. Also the geodesic is defined relative to the connection. Right now let's not consider the additional complication of torsion field - just plain vanilla 1915 GR.

Because gravitational waves are ripples on the curvature of spacetime we can use this propellant to attain acceleration simply by ejecting one hard vacuum into another. An example is that of a star undergoing asymmetric octupole collapse which achieves a net velocity change of ~ 200 km/sec via the gravitational wave propulsion effect [B. DeWitt (1979), "Quantum gravity: the new synthesis," in General Relativity: An Einstein centenary survey, eds. Hawking & Israel, p. 681].

OK, but are g-forces felt locally there or not? Velocity changes all the time on geodesics in curved space-time - and the gravity wave is simply a dynamic change in the curvature field.

Agreed there will be a propulsion, but is it like Alcubierre, i.e. geodesic, zero g-force for the occupants? It seems it must be so from the equivalence principle.

To elaborate on this, I must point out an important result from General Relativity Theory that because a graviton/gravitational wave has a definite energy it therefore is a source that induces its own gravitational field. This induced field is a second order effect in the h_ij (the usual first order metric quantities used in gravity wave field equations), which is tremendously magnified in the case of high frequency gravitational waves by the very large factor lambda^(-2) (lambda = wavelength) introduced by the terms quadratic in partial(h_ij)/partial(x^k) (i.e., terms 2nd order in 1/lambda; note that x^k are the usual spatial coordinates) that comprise the gravitational wave stress-energy-momentum density pseudo-tensor [Landau, L. D. and Lifshitz, E. M. (1998), The Classical Theory of Fields: Course of Theoretical Physics Vol. 2, 4th revised English edition, Butterworth and Heinemann, Oxford, pp. 347-350]. Therefore, the gravitational wave itself produces the background field on which it propagates.

Regards,

Eric

Baker was forced into a corner.

This is the exact same situation that went on in the U.S. over the development of the jet engine during WWII. The Germans and the British had a completely different world view about doing aviation research than the U.S. aviation engineering community had. So they went forth on the development of the jet engine whilst the U.S. aviation community refused to jump into it because the National Academy of Sciences published a report in 1940 concluding that jet engines were not practical and wouldn't work. Along comes Whittle in Britain and his counterpart in Germany who both develop practical working jet engines. Nearly all of the U.S. aviation industry, and NACA, were all stuck on using radial piston prop engines plus superchargers to boost their performance.

So along comes General Hap Arnold who also found himself in a corner because he was the only man in the U.S. government, while Nathan C. Price and Kelly Johnson were the only two industry men (at Lockheed-Burbank), who saw the potential for the jet engine to revolutionize aviation and win the war.

Arnold secretly brought Whittle's blueprints and complete engines to the U.S. and gave them to Pratt & Whitney and GE to copy and reproduce. This operation had documentation that was stamped "supersecret" in those days. The Army department in charge of funding aviation research, not knowing about Arnold's secret operation, declined Price and Johnson's 1940 Lockheed proposal to develop the L-1000 jet engine and use it to power the L-133 jet fighter (which looks almost like 21st century stealth) because they (the Army) thought the jet engine and aircraft design were far too futuristic to develop in time for wartime use.

Bob Baker is in sort of a reverse situation of this. He has general relativity physics that is backed up by the classic texts but no funds nor willingness on the part of the GR community to carry through a HFGW experiment. So he has to go seek foreign funding since foreigners are more open minded about doing different kinds of research and have the money and motivation to do so.

BTW, there are also two independent British and Italian efforts to generate HFGWs in the lab that are in development now.

I haven't read about Baker in a year or two but the concept is based upon oscillating mass.

Ray Chiao has another idea.

When it gets a jolt, it releases HFGW's in the GHz range His devise is designed to produce coherent waves that don't attenuate when passing through matter.

Problem is signal strength.

I had heard that he was working with the Chinese on a communications scheme--call your subs, have your cell phone contact anyone on the planet at any time, etc. I had also heard I think, that a year ago at STAIF he was saying that he had more confidence in communications apps than in propulsion.

That's what I told you.

I think there was a HFGW survey paper presented by someone at Boeing that had held higher hopes for propulsion but if Boeing were really interested, would Baker be taking Chinese money?

Sure, why not. Their money IS OUR MONEY. Where have you been?

Now I pop onto the web site and find projections for propulsion. Well color me crazy but WHERE ARE THE AMERICAN INVESTORS?!!!

If there is anything to it - it's classified is my guess financed by UAE. ;-)

The really surprising thing is that China is paying for research up front rather than stealing it or paying Hillary Clinton for it through donations to the democratic national party. Maybe they're afraid Condi will beat her.

What are you smoking? ;-)

On Apr 29, 2006, at 12:20 PM, Jack Sarfatti wrote:

I know George Chapline since 1966 at UCSD La Jolla and Cal Tech. We were both part of the scene that Greg Benford describes in his Sci Fi novel "Timescape" about messages from the future i.e. SIGNAL NONLOCALITY that I am working on NOW although that concept was UNKNOWN back in the 1960's & even 70's!I have written George about this and will see what he says.I have not yet considered the URLS in detail. Kip Thorne & Ray Chiao should be asked. It is so difficult to detect ELF gravity waves so is the claim here that the detection & generation of HFGW more efficient?

Even if it was, I do not understand the motivation for this approach because far field radiation is like a leak in the water tank when you are trying to conserve water!

That is, we want to use the MACRO-QUANTUM NEAR VIRTUAL GRAVITY FIELDS ~ 1/r^2 in the whole (frequency-wavevector space) etc. that do not propagate away to infinity in the form of gravity radiation. That is the gravity induction type fields (off-mass- shell) are more important for practical metric engineering of warp and wormhole than the gravity waves ~ 1/r (on-mass-shell where frequency = (speed of light)(wavenumber) locus in frequency-wavevector space).

On Apr 29, 2006, at 11:57 AM, RON STAHL wrote:

the good old boys are out of their minds. . .look at the 20 year projection at the first link

Jack, as you probably know, this propulsion concept is based upon creating a singularity through constructive interferance of HFGW's. Set aside whether you think Baker can succeed at this and tell me, with the projectors attached to a ship, which is falling toward the singularity, which is receeding as the ship draws near. . .a moving gravity well. I don't see a reason to suppose this would be limited to subluminal travel, do you?

What you wrote makes no sense to me. The basic idea is simple. You use dark zero point energy with negative pressure & w < - 1/3 BEHIND the ship. This dark energy's induced gravity repulsion expands space behind the ship and makes a counter- intuitive reverse Dopper gravity BLUE SHIFT of all signals coming from the expanding space at the stern. You do opposite in front i.e. positive pressure zero point energy causing contraction of space that gives a counter intuitive gravity red shift from the bow.

You do this by inhomogeneous phase-locking of the vacuum's Goldstone phases to a a control Goldstone phase in thin-film high Tc anyon condensate modulated by tiny perpendicular magnetic field flux quanta - all at micro->nanoscale. That's my rough current intuition on how it basically works.http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0602022